Book Image

React and React Native - Fourth Edition

By : Adam Boduch, Roy Derks, Mikhail Sakhniuk
Book Image

React and React Native - Fourth Edition

By: Adam Boduch, Roy Derks, Mikhail Sakhniuk

Overview of this book

Over the years, React and React Native has proven itself among JavaScript developers as a popular choice for a complete and practical guide to the React ecosystem. This fourth edition comes with the latest features, enhancements, and fixes to align with React 18, while also being compatible with React Native. It includes new chapters covering critical features and concepts in modern cross-platform app development with React. From the basics of React to popular components such as Hooks, GraphQL, and NativeBase, this definitive guide will help you become a professional React developer in a step-by-step manner. You'll begin by learning about the essential building blocks of React components. As you advance through the chapters, you'll work with higher-level functionalities in application development and then put your knowledge to work by developing user interface components for the web and native platforms. In the concluding chapters, you'll learn how to bring your application together with robust data architecture. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build React applications for the web and React Native applications for multiple mobile platforms.
Table of Contents (36 chapters)
1
Part 1 – React
15
Part 2 – React Native
31
Part 3 – React Architecture

Chapter 14: Why React Native?

Facebook created React Native (RN) to build its mobile applications. It started as a hackathon project in the summer of 2013 inside Facebook and became open source for everyone in 2015. The motivation to release it was because React for the web was so successful. They thought that if React was such a good tool for user interface (UI) development, and you wanted a native application, why not just make React work with mobile OS UI elements!

Therefore, in the same year, Facebook divided React into two independent libraries, React and ReactDOM, and since then, React has had to work only with interfaces and not care about where these elements will be rendered. The rendering part for the web was taken by ReactDOM, and for mobile platforms by RN.

In this chapter, you'll learn about the motivations for using RN to build native mobile web applications. Here are the topics that we'll cover in this chapter:

  • What is RN?
  • React and JSX...